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Saturday, September 8, 2012

GOP nominee Mitt Romney probably put it best in a statement released just after this morning's jobs numbers were released: "If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover."At 8:30 am ET this morning, we might have received the news that explained President Obama's startlingly bad performance last night. If there was a single moment Democrats thought they could count on to hit a convention grand slam, it was their clean-up hitter, Barack Obama, who would undoubtedly close the convention on a triumphant note. Instead, what we got was a wan, uninspiring speech from a president who seemed tired and even defeated.When Obama gave that speech, he already knew the numbers that were just released a few minutes ago. So it's not hard to imagine that his performance was affected, knowing that in just a few hours a bomb was about drop on his parade.And what a bomb it is. Expectations for the new jobs numbers ranged from 150,000 to 210,000. Instead, only 96,000 new private sector jobs were created -- a brutal number, even worse than last month's.The President was given a bit of window dressing in the form of the unemployment rate, which dipped from 8.3% to 8.1%. But even the Obama-worshipping media isn't attempting to spin this into good news. The reason the number dropped was only due to a
staggering number of people, 368,000, giving up the search for work and leaving the workforce.Romney again: "For every net new job created, nearly four Americans gave up looking for work entirely."Hope indeed.Overall, the labor participation rate also hit a new low, falling to 63.5%, the lowest number since the third quarter of 1981.Read the full story